


Grey

by riselioness



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Character Study, Coming to terms with who you are, Friendship, Gen, Going Grey, finding grey hairs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:01:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24233980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riselioness/pseuds/riselioness
Summary: Rey finds her first grey hair after Exegol. A post-TROS Rey character study.
Relationships: Poe Dameron & Finn & Rey & Rose Tico
Kudos: 4





	Grey

Rey finds her first grey hair after Exegol.

She’s never spent much time looking in the mirror, but the first time they let her wash and dress on her own, she can’t stop scrutinising her reflection.

She’s thin, too thin. She’s always been slender, but now the ravages of the past weeks and the slowness of her recovery show in the sharp lines and deep hollows of her face.

Not long after her return to Ajan Kloss she had collapsed, and been rushed straight to the medbay. She slept for a day and a half, waking to find Finn, Poe and Rose at her bedside. She spent the next few days drifting in and out of consciousness, too exhausted to be embarrassed about how she needed help to eat, dress, wash and even use the ‘fresher.

Now, standing in front of the mirror in the tiny ‘fresher of her room in the medbay, she stares at the single strand of silver glistening at her temple. It looks wrong, somehow. She’s young, isn’t she? Surely she’s too young to be going grey.

And yet, right now, Rey feels every one of her twenty years weighing on her like stones. All that time alone on Jakku, struggling to survive. The deaths of Han, Luke and Leia. The lives of countless thousands of Jedi surging in her and through her for a few brief moments. Fighting, finding and losing Ben Solo.

Maybe she’s not so young after all.

Rey reaches a hand to her temple to pluck out the hair, but something makes her stop. Her hand falls back to her side, and she meets her own eyes in the mirror.

She thinks of Leia, who wore her grey hair like a crown. She thinks of Holdo, who in holos displays a gloriously artificial purple coiffure. She thinks of Poe, who isn’t bashful about colouring his hair, but does it so discreetly that few people know.

Rey turns her head to the side, and watches the way the silver strand catches the light. Then she splashes water on her face, and leaves her reflection behind.

***

Rey feels grey too, for weeks, months after Exegol.

She knows she should be happy - the First Order has been defeated, the Final Order was wiped out before its fleet was even launched, and the Republic is gradually dragging itself from its own ashes. And, for the first time in her life, Rey feels safe.

She is happy, sometimes. Training with Finn, or reading the Jedi texts together. Arguing enjoyably with Poe over nothing, or sharing a caf at the start of the day. Working on the Falcon with Rose, or trading tips on maintaining the Resistance’s motley fleet of starfighters and transports.

But the greyness always returns, sooner or later.

It’s not that she enjoyed the fight against the First Order. But in it she found a purpose, friends, belonging. Now many of those friends are dead, and the Resistance is reinventing itself as a political organisation, and she has no idea where she fits in.

She feels adrift, cast loose without an anchor.

And then there’s the matter of her origins. She thought she’d come to terms with herself as herself, not just the product of who or where she came from. But knowing that she’s descended from Palpatine - 

Rey forgets it, for long stretches at a time. Then she remembers, and she wants to crawl out from her own skin.

Her friends know, and they accept her for who she is even when she struggles to. Finn, heart as big as a galaxy, who’s known her since she thought the Force was just a myth. Poe, who sees strengths and talents in her long before she would even think of them, and gives her the courage to explore them. Rose, who Rey secretly thinks of as a sister now.

She’s tried to talk with her friends about what happened between her and Ben, but she doesn’t understand it herself, so how can she explain it to them? She supposes she’ll never know now what they were to each other.

She misses Leia.

***

One morning, Rey wakes some time before sunrise and knows immediately that she won’t be getting back to sleep.

She lies for a while staring up at the ceiling, listening to Rose’s slow breathing in the bunk below. They all share rooms in the Resistance, even the Generals. One of the two could have had Leia’s room, but both Finn and Poe agreed it would be better for morale for their quarters to be just like the rest of their comrades’.

At first, Rey found it strange sharing a room. She’d spent so many years on her own on Jakku, and sharing living quarters took some getting used to. But Rose is an easy person to live with, and they know each other well enough now to know when the other needs space. 

Rey turns on her side, and gazes at the thin bar of light that slips under the bottom of the blind and stretches out on the floor. At this time in the morning it’s still dim, a narrow strip of pale grey on the darker floor.

Eventually, Rey accepts the inevitable. Careful to avoid waking Rose, she climbs out of bed, puts on her boots and her belt, puts a few things in her bag, and heads out.

As she walks through the barracks area, she clips her lightsaber to her belt. She’s not expecting to need it as a weapon, but she likes having it with her. It feels hers in a way Luke’s never did, and its presence at her hip is somehow comforting.

Even at this early hour, a few people are up and about. They greet her with nods and waves as she passes, making her way to the edge of the base where storage units and maintenance areas gradually peter out into the jungle. It’s pleasantly cool, and a fine grey mist hangs in the air, blurring the outlines of the trees.

Rey follows the path without giving much thought to where it’s leading, until it emerges onto a clearing. Here, the dimness of the morning is less dense, and the light filtering through the trees has the faintest touch of gold to it.

She lays her palm against the trunk of one of the trees, and savours the roughness of the bark on her skin. Then she shoulders her bag, and begins to climb.

The first time she climbed a tree, the very same day she arrived on Ajan Kloss, Rey marvelled how it could feel so strange and so new, yet so completely natural and familiar at the same time. She’d spent most of her life scrambling through wreckage to eke out a living, so the physical skill needed was easy. But to be so up close and personal with a life form so steady and strong with the Force, to grasp its branches and feel its embrace supporting her, was utterly unlike anything she’d ever experienced before.

The thrill of it has never left, and it fills her now as she climbs towards the dawn. She uses the Force to boost her a little as she makes a jump towards a branch just out of her reach, and realises she’s grinning.

Eventually, Rey emerges though the treeline. She chose her tree well - it’s somewhat taller than its fellows, and after climbing a little further she finds a fork in the branches where she can wedge herself in, and sit more or less comfortably. She’s not afraid of falling.

From here, she can see how the canopy rises and falls as it stretches out towards the horizon, in its own way not unlike the dunes of Jakku or the waves of Ahch-To. A grey haze covers the treetops, but the sun is just peeking over the horizon, and soon its pale gold fingers will brush the mist away.

Rey leans back against the trunk of the tree. A knot where a branch used to be digs into her back, but it doesn’t bother her. There’s something comforting in the discomfort, a reminder that she’s alive.

She inhales deeply, drinking in the greenness of the jungle air. Her mind goes back to the first breath of her second life.

Her fingers move to her temple, where that first silvery strand has been joined by a few more. She was right, she shouldn’t have grey hairs.

Strictly speaking, she shouldn’t be alive at all.

She should be dead. She was dead. She still doesn’t understand what happened on Exegol, or what there was between her and Ben, and has a feeling she never will. But she makes her decision.

Maybe someday she’ll colour her hair, and maybe she won’t.

But for now, she’ll wear her grey hairs like a trophy and a gift.


End file.
